by John Verdon
“Good—you’re there. Do you know if the mailman has been here yet?”
“Madeleine?”
“I’m down by the box. I have something to mail, but if he’s been here already, I’ll drop it off in town.”
“Actually, it was Rhonda, and she was here a while ago.”
“Damn. All right, no matter, I’ll deal with it later.”
Slowly her car emerged from behind the barn and turned up the pasture road to the house.
She entered through the side door of the kitchen with the strained look that driving in snow put on her face. Then she noted the very different look on his face.
“What’s up?”
Engrossed in a thought that had occurred to him during her call from the mailbox, it wasn’t until she’d taken off her coat and shoes that he answered.
“I think I just figured something out.”
“Good!” She smiled and awaited the details, shaking snowflakes out of her hair.
“The number mystery—the second one. I know how he did it—or how he could have done it.”
“The second one was?”
“The one with the number nineteen, the one Mellery recorded. I showed you the letter.”
“I remember.”
“The killer asked Mellery to think of a number and then to whisper it to him.”
“Why did he ask him to whisper? By the way, that clock is wrong,” she said, looking up at the Regulator.
He stared at her.
“Sorry,” she said lightly. “Go on.”
“I think he asked him to whisper because it added an odd element to the request that would lead him further from the truth than a simple ‘Tell me the number.’”
“I don’t follow you.”
“The killer had no idea what number Mellery had in mind. The only way to find out was to ask him. He was just trying to blow some smoke around that issue.”
“But wasn’t the number mentioned in a letter the killer had already left in Mellery’s mailbox?”
“Yes and no. Yes, the number was mentioned in the letter Mellery found in the box a few minutes later, but no, it wasn’t already in the box. In fact, the letter hadn’t been printed yet.”
“You lost me.”
“Suppose the killer had one of those mini printers attached to his laptop, with the text of the letter to Mellery complete except for the right number. And suppose the killer was sitting in his car by Mellery’s mailbox on that dark country road that runs past the institute. He calls Mellery on his cell phone—like you just called me from our mailbox—persuades him to think of a number and then ‘whisper’ it, and the instant Mellery says the number, the killer enters it in the letter text and hits the print button. Half a minute later, he sticks the letter in an envelope, pops it in the mailbox, and drives off—creating the impression that he’s a diabolical mind reader.”
“Very clever,” said Madeleine.
“Him or me?”
“Obviously both of you.”
“I think it makes sense. And it makes sense that he recorded traffic noise—to give the impression that he was somewhere other than a quiet country road.”
“Traffic noise?”
“Recorded traffic noise. Smart lab tech at BCI ran a sound-analysis program on the tape Mellery made of the phone call and discovered that there were two background sounds behind the killer’s voice—a car engine and traffic. The engine was first generation—that is, the sound was actually occurring at the same time as the sound of the voice—but the traffic was second generation, meaning that a tape of traffic sounds was being played behind the live voice. Didn’t make sense at first.”
“Now it does,” said Madeleine, “now that you’ve figured it out. Very good.”
He looked closely at her, searching for the sarcasm that so often underlay her comments on his involvement in the case but finding none. She was regarding him with real admiration.
“I mean it,” she said, as if detecting his doubt. “I’m impressed.”
A recollection came to him with surprising poignancy: how frequently she’d once looked at him that way in the early years of their marriage, how wonderful it had been to receive so often in so many ways the loving approval of such a fiercely intelligent woman, how priceless was the bond between them. And there it was again, or at least a delightful hint of it, alive in her eyes. And then she turned a little sideways toward the window, and the gray light dimmed her expression. She cleared her throat.
“By the way, did we ever get a new roof rake? They’re talking about ten to twelve inches of snow before midnight, and I’m not looking forward to another leak in the upstairs closet.”
“Ten to twelve inches?”
He seemed to remember there was an old roof rake in the barn, maybe repairable with enough duct tape ….
She uttered a small sigh and headed for the stairs. “I’ll just empty the closet.”
He couldn’t think of anything sensible to say. The phone ringing on the countertop saved him from saying something stupid. He picked it up on the third ring. “Gurney.”
“Detective Gurney, this is Gregory Dermott.” The voice was polite but fraught.
“Yes, Mr. Dermott?”
“Something happened. I want to make sure I’m alerting the proper authorities.”
“Happened?”
“I received a peculiar communication. I think it may be connected to the letters you told me were received by the crime victims. Can I read it to you?”
“First tell me how you got it.”
“How I got it is more disturbing than what it says. God, it makes my skin crawl! It was taped to the outside of my window—my kitchen window next to the little table where I have my breakfast every morning. Do you see what that means?”
“What?”
“It means he was there, right there touching the house, no more than fifty feet from where I was sleeping. And he knew what window to tape it to. That’s what makes it so creepy.”
“What do you mean, what window to tape it to?”
“The window where I sit every morning. That’s no accident—he must know that I have breakfast at that table, which means he’s been watching me.”
“Have you called the police?”
“That’s why I’m calling you now.”
“I mean your local police.”
“I know what you mean. Yes, I did call them—they’re just not taking the situation seriously. I was hoping a call from you might help. Can you do that for me?”
“Tell me what the note says.”
“Just a second. Here it is. Just two lines, written in red ink. ‘Come one, come all. / Now all fools die.’”
“You read this to the police?”
“Yes. I explained there might be a connection to two murders, and they said a detective would be out to see me tomorrow morning, which doesn’t sound to me like they think it’s urgent.”
Gurney weighed the pros and cons of telling him that there were now three murders but decided that the news wouldn’t add anything except more fear, and Dermott sounded like he already had plenty of that.
“What does the message mean to you?”
“Mean?” Dermott’s voice was panicky. “Just what it says. It says that someone is going to die. Now, it says. And the message was delivered to me. That’s what it means, for Godsake! What’s the matter with you people? How many dead bodies does it take to get your attention?”
“Try to stay calm, sir. Do you have the name of the police officer you spoke to?”
Chapter 42
Upside down
By the time Gurney finished a tough phone conversation with Lieutenant John Nardo, Wycherly PD, he’d received grudging assurance that an officer would be dispatched that afternoon to provide Gregory Dermott with protection, at least temporarily, subject to a final decision by the chief.
The snowstorm, meanwhile, had grown into a swirling blizzard. Gurney had been up for nearly thirty hours and knew that he needed to sleep, bu
t he decided to push himself a little further and put on a pot of coffee. He called upstairs to ask Madeleine if she wanted any. He couldn’t decipher her monosyllabic answer, although he should have known what it would be. He asked again. This time the “No!” was loud and clear—louder and clearer than necessary, he thought.
The snow wasn’t having its customary tranquilizing effect on him. The events in the case were piling up too rapidly, and launching his own poetic missive at the Wycherly post-office box in the hope of it reaching the killer was starting to feel like a mistake. He’d been given a degree of investigative autonomy, but it might not cover such “creative” interventions. As he waited for his coffee to brew, images of the Sotherton crime scene, including the flounder—which he pictured as vividly as if he’d seen it—competed with the note on Dermott’s window for space in his mind. Come one, come all. / Now all fools die.
Searching for a route out of his emotional morass, it occurred to him that he could either repair the fractured roof rake or take a closer look at the “nineteen” business to see if it could lead him anywhere. He chose the latter.
Assuming that the deception had worked the way he believed it had, what conclusions could be drawn? That the killer was clever, imaginative, cool under pressure, playfully sadistic? That he was a control freak, obsessed with making his victims feel helpless? All of the above, but those qualities were already obvious. What wasn’t obvious was why he’d chosen to go about it in that particular way. It dawned on Gurney that the outstanding fact about the “nineteen” trick was that it was a trick. And the effect of the trick was to create an impression that the perpetrator knew the victim well enough to know what he was thinking—without requiring any knowledge of him at all.
Christ!
What was that sentence in the second poem sent to Mellery?
Gurney almost ran from the kitchen into the den, grabbed his case file, and riffled through it. There it was! For the second time that day, he felt the thrill of touching a part of the truth.
I know what you think,
when you blink,
where you’ve been,
where you’ll be.
What was it Madeleine had said that night in bed? Was that last night or the night before? Something about the messages being peculiarly nonspecific—having no facts in them, no names, no places, nothing real?
In Gurney’s excitement he could feel major pieces of the puzzle clicking into place. The central piece was one he’d been holding upside down all along. The killer’s intimate knowledge of his victims and their pasts was, it now seemed clear, a pretense. Again Gurney read through his file of the notes and phone calls Mellery and the others had received, and he wasn’t able to find a scrap of evidence that the killer had any specific knowledge of them beyond their names and addresses. He did seem to know that at one time they all drank too much, but even there, there was no detail—no incident, person, place, time. It was all consistent with a killer trying to give his victims the impression that he knew them intimately when in fact he didn’t know them at all.
This raised a new question. Why kill strangers? If the answer was that he had a pathological hatred for everyone with a drinking problem, then why not (as Randy Clamm had said to Gurney in the Bronx) just toss a bomb into the nearest AA meeting?
Again his thoughts began running in a circle, as weariness flooded his mind and body. With weariness came self-doubt. The elation of realizing how the number trick was done and what that meant about the relationship between the killer and his victims was replaced by that old self-critical feeling that he should have realized it sooner—and then by the fear that even this would turn out to be another dead end.
“What’s wrong now?”
Madeleine was standing in the den doorway, holding a bulging black plastic garbage bag, her hair disarranged by her closet-clearing mission.
“Nothing.”
She gave him an I-don’t-believe-you look and deposited the garbage bag at the door. “This stuff was on your side of the closet.”
He stared at the bag.
She went back upstairs.
The wind made a thin whistling sound at a window that needed new weather stripping. Damn. He’d meant to fix that. Every time the wind hit the house at that angle …
The phone rang.
It was Gowacki from Sotherton.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, it’s a flounder,” he said without bothering to say hello. “How the hell did you know that?”
* * *
The fish confirmation gave Gurney’s sleep-deprived psyche a quick lift out of the pit. It gave him enough energy to call the irritating Jack Hardwick about a point that had been bothering him all along. It was the first line of the third poem—which he extricated from his file as he dialed Hardwick’s number.
I do what I’ve done
not for money or fun
but for debts to be paid,
amends to be made.
For blood that’s as red
as a painted rose.
So every man knows
he reaps what he sows.
As usual, he had to endure a long minute of random abuse before he could get the BCI detective to listen to his concern and respond to it. The response was typical Hardwick.
“You figure the past tense means the perp already left a few severed heads behind him by the time he knocked off your buddy?”
“That would be the obvious meaning,” said Gurney, “since the three victims we know of were alive when that was written.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Might be a good idea to send out an MO inquiry for similars.”
“How detailed you want the modus operandi spelled out?” Hardwick’s arch intonation made the Latin term sound like a joke. His chauvinistic tendency to find foreign languages laughable always got under Gurney’s skin.
“Up to you. In my opinion the throat wounds are the key piece.”
“Hmm. You thinking this inquiry goes out to Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, maybe New Hampshire and Vermont?”
“I don’t know, Jack. You decide.”
“Time frame?”
“Last five years? Whatever you think.”
“Last five years is as good as anything else.” He made it sound as bad as anything else. “You all set for Captain R’s get-together?”
“Tomorrow? Sure, I’ll be there.”
There was a pause. “So you think this fucking lunatic has been at this for a while?”
“Looks like a possibility, doesn’t it?”
Another pause. “You getting anywhere on your end?”
Gurney gave Hardwick a summary of the facts and his new interpretation of them, ending with a suggestion. “I know that Mellery was in rehab fifteen years ago. You might want to check for any criminal or public-record data on him—anything involving alcohol. Ditto for Albert Rudden, ditto Richard Kartch. The homicide guys on the Rudden and Kartch cases are working on victim bios. They may have dug up something relevant. While you’re at it, it wouldn’t hurt to poke a little further into the background of Gregory Dermott. He’s entangled in this mess somehow. The killer chose that Wycherly post-office box for some reason, and now he’s threatening Dermott himself.”
“He’s what?”
Gurney told Hardwick about the “Come one, come all. / Now all fools die” note taped to Dermott’s window and about his conversation with Lieutenant Nardo.
“What are you thinking we’ll find in the background checks?”
“Something that makes sense out of three facts. First, the killer is focused on victims with drinking histories. Second, there is no evidence that he knew any of them personally. Third, he selected victims who lived far apart geographically, which suggests some factor in their selection other than just excessive alcohol consumption—a factor that connects them to each other, to the killer, and probably to Dermott. I have no idea what it is, but I’ll know it when I see it.”
&
nbsp; “Is that a fact?”
“See you tomorrow, Jack.”
Chapter 43
Madeleine
Tomorrow came with a peculiar suddenness. After his conversation with Hardwick, Gurney had taken off his shoes and sprawled on the den couch. He slept deeply, without interruption, through the remainder of the afternoon and on through the night. When he opened his eyes, it was morning.
He stood, stretched, looked out the window. The sun was creeping up over the brown ridge on the eastern side of the valley, which he figured would make it about 7:00 A.M. He didn’t have to leave for his BCI meeting until 10:30. The sky was perfectly blue, and the snow glittered as though it had been mixed with shattered glass. The beauty and peace of the scene mingled with the aroma of fresh coffee to make life for the moment seem simple and fundamentally good. His long rest had been thoroughly restorative. He felt ready to make the phone calls he’d been postponing—to Sonya and to Kyle—and was stopped only by the realization that they’d both still be asleep. He lingered for a few seconds over the image of Sonya in bed, then went out to the kitchen, resolving to make the calls right after nine.
The house had the empty feeling it always had when Madeleine was out. Her absence was confirmed by the note he found on the countertop: “Dawn. Sun about to come up. Incredibly beautiful. Snowshoeing to Carlson’s Ledge. Coffee in pot. M.” He went to the bathroom, washed, brushed his teeth. As he was combing his hair, the thought occurred to him that he could set out after her. Her reference to the imminent sunrise meant she’d left within the past ten minutes or so. If he used his cross-country skis and followed in her snowshoe tracks, he could probably overtake her in about twenty minutes.